#29faceschallenge - Day 1

The 29 Faces Challenge is back! It runs all through September and you need to draw or paint one face a day (or less if you are not able to) all through the month.

I was caught a bit off-guard and I realised the challenge had started only when Day 1 was almost over, so I quickly grabbed my Hobonichi and a brush and just did a quick sketch.

Here is a link with all the details for the challenge: http://29faces.blogspot.de/p/september-2016.html

Days 18 and 19: #29faces challenge

Here are my offerings for days 18 and 19 of the #29faces challenge:

Spontaneous fountain pen drawing

Gimp and Inkscape collaboration

Days 12 and 13 - #29faces Challenge

This is for day 12 and this is my daughter made with markers and watercolours. It's probably one of the first times that I managed to get the skin tons so well. I have done it by mixing some beige, yellow and a touch of pink. I have increased the amount of pink around the cheeks to give her a rosy look. I also tried to not draw or paint the pupils and it doesn't look too bad, so this is something that I might have to keep in mind for the future.

Day 13 looks like this:

This is Hiro Hamada from the movie Big Hero 6. I took this picture from the manga and I really like how his hair is so messy and spiky. I'm not quite happy with how the mouth turned out but it will have to do for now. One thing I really liked is that I could easily use my basic colour scheme of 3 colours with black, red and grey and it looks great.

Days 10 and 11 - #29faces challenge

I'm a little bit late to post so here is day 10:

I doodled this one evening and I didn't use a safety net any pencil first, which is highly unusual for me.

And on to day 11:

Back to my old stomping grounds with this sketch of Sailor Moon. I discovered the series when I was already going to the university and at the time, it was not so cool to reveal that you were still watching cartoons at the ripe old age of 20. So I watched it in secret but now that it has become cool, I can proudly come out of the anime closet and say, I watch Sailor Moon and I like it!

Day 9 - #29faces challenge

This is a face I picked from a Panini sticker album about an anime series I used to love back when I was 11 about football (soccer). It's called Captain Tsubasa. Every now and again, I see either manga books or DVD box sets popping up again so the series still seems to be relevant even today.

This was not one of the major characters but one that had a distinctive face so I picked him for today. I may go back and pick one (or two!) of the main characters, for old time's sake. To be honest, I don't know which name he got either in the original Japanese or in the English version. In the French version he was called Bruce.

Hobonichi Challenge - Catching Up

I believe I haven't posted the last few sketches I did for the Hobonichi Challenge, so here they are:

My last drink

Cherry tomato (faceless fruit scares me!)

Button

Days 7 and 8 - #29faces challenge

Here is my offering for Day 7:

This is a portrait of John Constantine from the Hellblazer series. It was bound to happen as I like this character a lot. This was not the picture I had originally intended to draw but my muse decided otherwise and this was the picture I ended up with. If I remember correctly, it's the latest incarnation of Constantine that is being shown in the new comic series of Constantine. I wasn't too fond of his hair so I just skipped it!... I really like how rough his face still looks like.

Day 8:

This was something I doodled while watching TV with no clear idea of where I was going. I had started with Harry Potter and the others came along.

When I was spending my semester abroad at the University of Wolverhampton, England, I met plenty of people and since I'm not that good with remembering faces, I decided to draw a cheat sheet for myself that I carried along. In it, I would draw each person I met with their name and nationality (there were many nationalities and I also needed to differentiate the Germans from the Austrians) and their characteristic that made them unique. It really helped me a lot and it looked a lot like the Harry Potter drawing I did above.

#29faces challenge - Days 5 & 6

It seems I have forgotten to post the last few #29faces challenge pictures for the past couple of days so here they are:

Day 5:

In case you didn't guess who this is, it is Neil Degrasse Tyson. I have only recently been made aware of how awesome he is and I thought he would make an excellent subject for the challenge. I used markers mainly with 2 different shades of grey and black.

Day 6:

This is a sketch of one of my favourite comic book characters called Nemi by Norwegian artist Lise Myhre. You can follow her on her Facebook page.

29 Faces Challenge - Day 4

My take on Lisbeth Salander from the Millenium series by Stieg Larsson. I based myself on the look given to Rooney Mara because it was so extreme and simply because I wanted to draw a mohawk.

I really liked the book series although I got lost somewhere in book 3. I also watched both the Swedish movies as well as the American remake. While I tend to be against remakes of classical movies, I have to say that I liked this particular remake. One thing I was looking forward to when they announced that they were making a new (American) movie (after the extreme disgust I felt when I heard the news) was to see how they were going to interpret Lisbeth. She is such a strong and unique character and I was afraid that they would glamourise her too much but they kept her as understated as she was in the books and this is probably the reason why I liked the movie.

Day 2 - #29faces

Day 2 - Bruce Wayne, Bruce Timm style

This is my offering for Day 2 of the 29 Faces challenge. I chose this picture of Bruce Wayne because this square jaw is simply stunning. Even though it looks very strong, it still fits in very nicely with the character. After all, it's the only element of the masked hero that isn't hidden by a mask.

2015 Hobonichi

This past year, I challenged myself to do a sketch or a painting everyday and in order to track my progress I have chosen to do so on a Hobonichi planner. I wasn't quite sure that the super thin pages would cope but they did and they did so beautifully well.

This year, I have decided to not do this particular challenge but instead, I will take part in any monthly art challenge that I can find. In February, I am going to take part in the #29faces challenge that consists in drawing/painting/sketching one face per day. This is going to be even more of a challenge for me since I'm not that good at drawing (human) faces. I'm really hoping to learn from this and to improve my skills.

For now, here are quite a few pictures of the best sketches I did in my Hobonichi this past year.

You can get your very own Hobonichi here!

W.I.P. = Wolf In Progress

Recently, a friend of mine visited a wolf sanctuary and took stunning pictures of a few wolves he met out there and one in particular got my creative motors running. It was a stunning white wolf with triangular black eyes. Today, I couldn't resist it any longer and I just took my favourite picture and started sketching him. And here is the work in progress: